Game Day Mani: South Carolina

As I mentioned two weeks ago, now that Pretty Little Liars is over, I'm going to start using my normal #RedCoatTuesday slot to honor a different Red Coats - the University of Georgia!  [For those not in the know, UGA's marching band is called the Redcoat Band, which I was in for two years in college!]  So, every Tuesday, I'm going to share my team spirit!  Last week was a by-week, so I didn't do a spirit mani, but I was back on track this week!  It was a crappy game that made me sad, but I'm glad that I had BEGL taxes to take some of my attention away from the horrible defense.  Anyway, enough with the football talk.  Let's get back to polish!

Purchased by me.

For this weekend's mani, I decided to go with something classic and yet still not super boring and plain - a French mani!  I actually took this look from Ashley over at Plump and Polished.  Hers is a bit different than mine, but I really liked that extra pop of color she added in underneath the main tip color!  For this look I used Elevation Polish SBPs in Rococo and Last Stop... Siberia.

Rococo is a lovely blood red with red and gold shimmers, and LSS is a black with purple, blue, and copper shimmers.  It's also glow-in-the-dark, but the gitd pigment settles.  I didn't really want to have gitd stripes, so I didn't shake it up and mix it back in.

First, I painted my base coat, which I used KBShimmer's Basic Training because I didn't want this mani going anywhere since I painted them two days before the game.  I love using Basic Training when I want a mani to have sticking power!  While I love my normal base of Quimica, it does tend to peel off a little more easily than a real base coat.  I then painted on Rococo on top of the base coat.  I don't have perfect application when it comes to smile lines, so I had to do a fair amount of cleanup.  I took the rest of the base coat off with the extraneous red, but that was by design so it wouldn't look patchy.

Next, I painted on a small stripe of LSS abutting Rococo.  I didn't do it with a striper, so I ended up doing the same type of cleanup that I used on the red.

Last, I added a coat of my beloved Quimica over the bare part of my nail and over the tips, and I then added a coat of KBShimmer's Clearly on Top to finish it off.  I'm really happy that there wasn't any smearing, either!

All in all, this mani was nice, but I was a little bored with it.  I thought about adding something else like a decal, but I ran out of time.  You can purchase Elevation polishes at her site here.  Unfortunately, these are both small batches, so they won't be back.  So, what do you think?  Do you like French manicures, or do you think they're old fashioned?  They used to be my thing for a long time, but my nails hadn't been long enough in recent years to really do them anymore.  It was nice to give it another try!